The Art of Drowning
by calligraphied
Summary: A young woman struggles to put the past behind her after serving as a Navy nurse in the Pacific. Desperate for work, she answers an advertisement in the local paper looking for a new maid - only to find that the son of the family, Eugene, has brought back his own demons from the war. Sledge/OC.


_chapter one._

.

.

.

I startle awake at twelve thirty. Like clockwork.

I've become accustomed to them, the dreams. Not that my resignation to their existence lessens them – if anything, they're getting more intense as the months go by - but somehow it makes them easier to deal with. They'll always be there. I've known that since they started a couple years back, swimming before my waking eyes in the bullet-eaten hull of a Navy ship some thirty miles off the shore of Peleliu. I remember crying; quiet sobs that beat down on my ribcage like sharp knuckles on the outsides of angry fists. I'd rolled over, cupping a palm to my open mouth that had gone clammy with cooling sweat, and tried to drown out the overwrought sobs with prayers to God.

_Please, just let me go home. Please. __Send a bullet, send a plane through this godforsaken ship. I don't care if they die. I don't care if I die. __I __just can't do this anymore._

I wish I could forget.

The apartment is quiet except for the sounds of the city filtering in through a crack in the window. It's late fall, 1946, and already the first traces of winter are blanching the sidewalks white and the faces I pass on the street even whiter. Even though I haven't felt that same kind of sweltering claustrophobic heat in years, I can't get it out of my system, scratch the memory out of the surface of my skin. I've come to prefer the cold. After all, I've felt hellfire, and it's not flames at all. It's feverish skin and hot pulsing blood that scorches your hands when you've got your arms buried up to the elbows in a man's open stomach. Hell is just a humid island summer warmed by the heat of battle. I never want to feel the once pleasant burn of the sun on my face again.

On my way to the windows, I flick a switch on, my footsteps chasing skittish shadows into hiding places as the glare of the fluorescent light fills the kitchen walls to their brims. The air is cool, crisp with the death of autumn still in its grasp, like a corpse slowly going rigid in its arms. I wrench the windows open all the way so the outside air hits me hard. The force of a wind gust nearly knocks me back on my heels but I like the split-second feeling of weightlessness it leaves behind.

Despite the racket of sirens, rowdy voices, the throaty rumble of engines passing through the street below, it's more peaceful out here. I almost wish I could just...float out into it. Lay my head back and run my fingers through satin tendrils of air softened by darkness and starlight. Kind of like floating in the ocean, letting the waves push you and pull you wherever it wants you to go. No control, no fighting. Just _being._

I take a deep breath in through my nose. It burns a little, stings the narrow passage lined in sensitive hermit-like skin, but it's a good burn. A cleansing acid wash of fresh air. Anything's better than being spread out across that bed staring at the back of my eyelids, wishing for just one more hour, one more minute of sleep to purge the exhaustion rooting in my bones But at the same time, I'm hoping to God that sleep doesn't come at all. If I don't sleep I don't dream. If I don't dream, I don't have to remember them at all. Their voices, the color bleeding out of their eyes as last breaths gurgle out of ripped open throats.

My legs wobble. As much as I don't want to sleep – and can't, that was the last wink I'd get for the night – I'm still tired, there's no getting it out of my system. I sigh through gritted teeth and decide I've had my fill of self-pity and revert to self-hatred instead. Rage turns my blood to hot lead. My heart drums thickly against the solid wall of my sternum as it chokes on the poison flooding into it. It happens sometimes, where I hate myself with the same bloodthirsty intensity as I hated the Japanese enemy. It always lasts for just a fraction of a second, but it always leaves a guilt behind that soon turns to rot.

I hate feeling sorry for myself. I hate feeling at all.

In those instances, the old dying embers reignite so suddenly into wildfire that its jarring. Overwhelming. Its like having your soul shoved back into you when it doesn't fit anymore, doesn't belong, and the sensation is so claustrophobic it translates into pain. I close my eyes and struggle to breathe, steeling myself against the incoming tide. Rage, desperation, regret, and fear - it all comes back to me at once. My brain can't process them as words, thoughts, voices of reason, so it turns them into pain instead. Something it can at least try to understand.

I feel like I'm on fire. A deep, cruel ache blooms just under the skin. I hear them again. They find the walls of what I struggled to keep as a sanctuary and tarnish them with the blood of their memory. I see their eyes. Those faces of little boys that shrivel and turn doll-like in death. No soul. No life. No longer afraid. Just a throbbing dead weight falling back into my arms.

I wrench the window down to its former position.

Everything goes still at once.

An angry knock against the floor under my feet brings me back to reality. "Hey! We're tryin' to get some sleep down here, do ya mind?!"

Numb, I find my way back to the living room where a few pieces of mismatched furniture warm the blank spaces between empty staring walls. I cross my arms over my chest, as though I'll fall apart at my seams if I don't hold myself together. Part of me wants to cry. But I can't. I ran out of tears a long time ago.

I slump into a chair and don't move until dawn comes.

At least the light is comforting.

.

.

.

A few hours later, I'm standing at a bus stop with a bunch of other hopefuls searching for work. By the looks of them – denim trousers with holes in the knees that they wear like badges of honor - some are heading out to the country, wranglers and laborers willing to lend a hand wherever they're needed. Others are simply housewives armed with grocery lists, dragging smartly dressed children in their wake.

A little girl stands dutifully at her mother's side, pale chubby hand tucked firmly away into the larger grip. She's staring at me. I wonder if she can see the holes in my disguise. Judging by the look on her face – brows tugged together, eyes widening in their sockets – I can only guess that she can.

It must be frightening, to see something that looks so human walking among the rest like it belongs. To have a smile ready, a friendly greeting, only to meet its eyes and realize that its not human at all. I don't really know what to call us. Walking wounded? We save that moniker for the soldiers who deserve the title. The real heroes, who sacrificed more than just their skins and their souls to get where they are. I was just a Navy nurse. I never saw my friends die or my sanity leak out of the tears in my weathered uniform. I just mopped up their blood and sent them back out into the Hell they prayed to escape from.

"Mommy..." The little girl finds the tailored hem of her mother's sleeve.

"Not now, darling."

I move away from the two of them, for her sake, and disappear behind a tall, grizzly man with a shaggy beard. It's probably got nothing to do with me. Perhaps she saw a bird behind my head or was reminding her mother of the promise of a sweet shop after their trip to the market. But after what I've seen in the mirror – dead sagging eyes staring out of a gaunt face - I've become paranoid about how I must look to the people around me. Normal people who've never had to keep a man from falling apart with just their hands as a surgeon quickly sews them up. Who've never seen what their insides look like – all pink and raw and twitching at the feeling of hot sticky air settling on them – just by glancing down at the still living body torn in two in front of them.

They don't know because they're innocent, especially her. And despite my jealousy, I want more than anything for them to stay that way.

The bus finally turns a corner and starts to jostle its way down Dauphin. I keep my head down and stare for so long at the concrete that I lose my focus and all the dull gray colors start to run together. I'm tired. So tired. I start to sway a little from side to side, moving with the wind as it pushes me around as if for fun, to see if I'll break if it pushes just a little harder. I stay that way until the man beside me – the one with the bush-like beard – touches my shoulder.

Out of instinct, I startle. My arm stretching out to block his hand.

"Sorry, ma'am, didn't mean to give you a start." He smiles gently, affably. "It's just the bus is here."

Embarrassed, I nod, but keep my eyes down away from his before they start to search me. "Yeah." I glance quickly at him, trying to return that big beaming smile that seems too wide for his face. "Thank you."

We file on. All of us. The little girl, her mother, the bearded man heading up the rear behind me. A too-cheerful bus driver perches on a cracked leather seat, his right hand balancing on the gear shift as he waits for all of us to board. He greets all of us as we step inside. I'm the only one that doesn't return his cloying salutations. They make my skin crawl.

The little girl and her mother sit down near the middle, scooting into the ugly green leather that matches the kind the driver is sitting on. Her eyes find me immediately. I can feel them roving over me, searching for a tell, a weak soft spot in the mask where she can wriggle under and find the true face of the creature beneath. Survival instinct gnashes its teeth in my gut and I turn my head toward the sunlight that leaks through the grimy windowpanes. As I pass her, I quicken my pace a little, and sit behind a ranch hand with his arms draped loosely over his chest and his head leaning into the back of the seat. His eyes are closed. I should be safe here.

Once everyone has found a place to sit, the bus starts to roll forward, jerking forward in neck-breaking jolts until it finds a pace that it can easily maintain. In front of me, the ranch hand starts to snore, and I press my lips tightly together to stifle a laugh. The smile fades and I look down at my lap for something to do, remembering the paper I've stashed away in the breast pocket of my nearly threadbare jacket. I fish it out, unfold it, and smooth the creases I've made from the thousand other times I've sat and unfolded the tattered thing like I do now. As the paper opens, a black, uniform font peeks out from between the deeply worn lines. Red circles appear distinctly over one particular block of text:

_WANTED: _

_Lady of the house seeking live-in help. Twenty five dollars a week for medium-to-light cleaning duties. Room and board provided. Telephone for appointments during morning hours only._

I almost laugh again at the irony of it all. My mother, before the mess the war made, always had high hopes for my future. It wasn't her fault, really. I'd always seemed bright, marginally ambitious, at least more than the average girl who only hoped for a good man to find her and sweep her off her feet. In school I received good marks and the praise of those teachers whose judgments weren't clouded by the fact that I was a girl. So what happened? My mother asked me that question at least once a day when I'd returned from overseas with a heaviness in my heart that she couldn't understand. _What__ happened__, __Laura__?_

I've finally given her an answer, long after she stopped asking for one.

Nothing. Nothing's happened, momma.

And nothing will happen ever again.

.

.

.

My stop is the last one on the route and I'm the only person left. When I sit up and look around, I don't see much – pristine lawns so green it's blinding, dreamy old willow trees standing guard behind black wrought-iron gates. We're on the outskirts of civilization. All the busy streets, rundown buildings, and bloated sidewalks of city life have been left behind. This is where the rich folk live. Country doctors, old money. Dutiful wives serve sweet tea and biscuits in the afternoon on freshly painted verandas. This is where life slows down and takes a look around. It's easier to think in the silence.

I slip the advertisement in my pocket again and get off the bus without so much as looking at the driver. He's given up on me anyway, the doors snapping shut a split second after my hand drops from the railing. For a long minute, I stand there, staring at the bus as it drives away, a distraction from the nerves crowding together in my gut. All of the sudden I don't want to be here. I want to run through the columns of trees stained green from the reflections of mossy underbrush and swampy sunlight. To run until the woodlands turn to grasslands that roll out before me like a carpet that tickles your feet and leaves a pleasant itch behind. I want to stand there, soak in the nothingness, the void of nature around me, and then run some more.

But I need to work. I need this job.

Finally, I push myself forward. One foot in front of the other, I tell myself; it's easier to do than think about what's to come. The driveway leading up to _2564 Springhill Ave _is long and it narrows until it reaches the house, where it meets with its twin on the other side to form a path. Its edges along the borders of a flat, grassy lawn on one side – not one dandelion poking out of the green - and a circular courtyard on the other. The patch of round landscape in the middle of the property serves as a sort of veranda where they do their solitary thinking and drink their morning coffee. Two wicker lawn chairs and a glass-topped end table sit in mottled shadows that shift under an old shade tree in front of the house.

Though it's obvious that the property is well maintained and conditioned to give off some semblance of order, there's still some kind of wilderness that touches this place. Its so far away from concrete and people and our hands that only seem to know how to destroy. Like another world entirely. Or another time.

At the porch, a middle-aged black woman emerges from the front door, and I'm near enough where I can hear the snap of its hinges swinging back into the frame. We appraise each other. She looks healthy enough, happy enough, as happy as someone trapped in domestic servitude can be anyway. I can only guess what she thinks of me.

Her appearance is neat and tidy, uniform pressed, and the only things about her that seem out of place are the tiny black hairs sticking to her damp forehead.

"You Miss Cooper?" She asks as I hesitate before the first steps of the porch.

I nod. "Yes, I'm her."

She gestures for me to follow her with a wave of her hand. "Mrs. Sledge is waitin' on you."

I follow her inside, my mouth going slack with wonder as I take in my surroundings. Good God, what a place. "I hope I'm not too late...my bus was runnin' behind."

There's a hint of a smile in her voice; I can tell even with her back to me. "No need to fret, honey, you're just in time."

She rounds a corner and we enter a small parlor room, where they sit in afternoons and take their coffee after supper. A bay window facing west extends along the length of the wall before us, potted plants lending life and color to the empty mounting. The woman offers me a seat on the velvety sofa overlooking a rich mahogany coffee table, my back to the window that smiles at me like a gaping glass mouth. I'm almost afraid to take it; it looks like it could be worth more than a month's rent.

Her hand lingers over the cushioned backing of the sofa. "You have a sit down and I'll fetch the missus."

Once she's gone, the feeling that I don't belong here creeps back up on me, stronger than before. My hands twist together in my lap as I try to wring out the anxiety that prickles in the tips of my fingers. I find myself wanting to look around, but continue to fight the urge and fix my eyes on the hands that wrangle together in the folds of my trousers. Footsteps finally start to echo down the hallway in front of me and I glance up to see an older, warm-faced woman emerge from behind the wall. Her eyes nearly disappear completely when she smiles.

"Miss Cooper," she says gently, and I stand immediately out of respect. "It's a pleasure to finally make your acquaintance."

Her voice is rich and honeyed. I could almost curl up in the folds of its drawling timber and sleep forever.

"Mrs. Sledge." I nod, following her example when she sits down in the tall-backed chair across from the gleaming coffee table.

"Now," she starts, rubbing her hands absently together in thought. "I understand you're here for the help position."

"Yes ma'am," I reply. "Found your advertisement a couple days ago."

For a moment, only the ticking of the grandfather clocked nestled into the nook between wall and fireplace interrupts the silence. She's studying me, her head cocking ever so slightly to the side in such a way that if I weren't looking straight at her – every last feeler of awareness outstretched toward her in question – I wouldn't see it. I can't blame her; she must be wondering. What a girl like me is doing here asking for a job like this. The question blazes so fiercely in her eyes that I can almost see the marks of those burning words forming behind them – glistening like fresh scars on pale skin. She opens her mouth to speak, pausing at the last second. Just enough time for me to brace myself for what I know is coming.

"I know it isn't my place to ask," she begins, flicking her eyes upward to meet mine. "But the curiosity is a bit overwhelming, if you can forgive me."

I don't answer. I'm afraid what will come out of my mouth if I try to.

"What is a girl like you doing here?" She asks. Her smile is good-natured, reflecting the equally good intentions behind it. "Young, pretty, could have the world if she asked for it..."

She trails off. I know she wants an answer, there's no getting around it, so I take a short panicked breath in through my nose and gather my wits about me.

"I-"

The door bursts open a couple of rooms away. Both of us turn toward the great hall as footsteps thud dully against the burnished wood floorboards, growing louder and louder and more pronounced as they approach. Suddenly a figure appears across the room. A slight-built man dressed in a modest black suit. The only thing that stands out against the solemn backdrop of pale skin and black and white cloth is the shock of burning scarlet hair, like the color of blood when it hits the biting hot air.

"Eugene?"

His head snaps to the side, seeking out the voice of the one who called him. He looks angry, but it is a kind of child's anger, framed in plush skin that hasn't quite grown into the sharpness of cheekbones and hard angular jawline. His face is a contradiction to the fierceness of its current expression. Kind, sloping lines, a wide-set mouth that would seem friendly if not curled into a snarl. Everything about him is doe-like, innocent– everything except the hardness that breaks like pieces of flint in his eyes.

A silent plea for privacy appears in his dark gaze, but Mrs. Sledge doesn't seem to notice it. Or ignores it entirely.

"Eugene you're back so soon?"

Still frowning, his focus drifts to the side – trying to escape his mother's interrogation tactics. He seems to finally realize I'm there and his entire body freezes, a rigidness stealing through the slack muscles until he goes ramrod straight where he stands. His entire attitude changes in the blink of an eye when he realizes there's company.

He attempts a smile, but the mild expression looks strange against the backdrop of his roiling black eyes. "They were quicker than I expected, that's all."

"Well you'll have to tell your father and I all about it over supper."

The boy nods, letting the smile drop as he turns his face away. I watch him walk away until the image of his scarlet hair no longer burns into the back of my mind.

Mrs. Sledge turns back to me with a gleam of pride in her eyes. I recognize something else in them, something heavy that strains against the rest of her composure as if it's too heavy to carry. I've seen it in my own mother's face so many times before, but I can't quite place it. "That's my son, Eugene," she explains. "He just returned from the war a few months back."

There, that's it. Sorrow. It mingles with the helplessness. I remember my mother's words when she described the feeling to me, just before I left home.

_It's like watching your child drown. There's nothing you can do to save them, they're going down, so all you can do is watch and wait for their head to slip under the surface. And then they're gone forever._

All at once I feel sorry for Mrs. Sledge. She and my mother have both blindly held out their hands to drowning children – they could see us out there, floating, crying out for help. But they couldn't even imagine the depth of that ocean. They couldn't see the height of the crushing waves that held us in their grasp.

I offer her a smile. She seems to understand and accepts it.

"So, dear." She says, desperate to change the subject. "When can you start?"

Mrs. Sledge turns her head to hide the pain in her face. But I know it all too well.


End file.
